'emotional intelligence is difficult' is a judgement that you can release to get a closer understanding of how to make it easier ;)
feeling is the way to learn here and part of the challenge is the massive over-reliance on thinking. as an analogy, if you want to improve your microscopic hearing as a sound engineer, it can help to close your eyes. if you want to improve understanding of feeling, then you need to reduce your reliance on thinking. that doesn't mean to totally stop thought, but to allow feeling to fill in some of the gaps that the thinking tries to fill in.